The Palace at Midnight: The Collected Work of Robert Silverberg, Volume Five Read online

  I had a chance to do a little herd-thinning myself just now. Mysterious stirring in the spongy soil right at my feet, and I looked down to see triceratops eggs hatching! Seven brave little critters, already horny and beaky, scrabbling out of a nest, staring around defiantly. No bigger than kittens, but active and sturdy from the moment of birth.

  The corythosaur meat has probably spoiled by now. A more pragmatic soul very likely would have augmented her diet with one or two little ceratopsians. I couldn’t do it.

  They scuttled off in seven different directions. I thought briefly of catching one and making a pet out of it. Silly idea.

  25 August. 0700 hours. Start of the fifth day. I’ve done three complete circumambulations of the island. Slinking around on foot is fifty times as risky as cruising around in a module, and fifty thousand times as rewarding. I make camp in a different place every night. I don’t mind the humidity any longer. And despite my skimpy diet, I feel pretty healthy. Raw dinosaur, I know now, is a lot tastier than raw frog. I’ve become an expert scavenger—the sound of a tyrannosaur in the forest now stimulates my salivary glands instead of my adrenals. Going naked is fun, too. And I appreciate my body much more, since the bulges that civilization puts there have begun to melt away.

  Nevertheless, I keep trying to figure out some way of signaling Habitat Vronsky for help. Changing the position of the reflecting mirrors, maybe, so I can beam an SOS? Sounds nice, but I don’t even know where the island’s controls are located, let alone how to run them. Let’s hope my luck holds out another three and a half weeks.

  27 August. 1700 hours. The dinosaurs know that I’m here and that I’m some extraordinary kind of animal. Does that sound weird? How can great dumb beasts know anything? They have such tiny brains. And my own brain must be softening on this protein-and-cellulose diet. Even so, I’m starting to have peculiar feelings about these animals. I see them watching me. An odd knowing look in their eyes, not stupid at all. They stare and I imagine them nodding, smiling, exchanging glances with each other, discussing me. I’m supposed to be observing them, but I think they’re observing me, too, somehow.

  This is crazy. I’m tempted to erase the entry. But I’ll leave it as a record of my changing psychological state if nothing else.

  28 August. 1200 hours. More fantasies about the dinosaurs. I’ve decided that the big brachiosaur—Bertha—plays a key role here. She doesn’t move around much, but there are always lesser dinosaurs in orbit around her. Much eye contact. Eye contact between dinosaurs? Let it stand. That’s my perception of what they’re doing. I get a definite sense that there’s communication going on here, modulating over some wave that I’m not capable of detecting. And Bertha seems to be a central nexus, a grand totem of some sort, a—a switchboard? What am I talking about? What’s happening to me?

  30 August. 0945 hours. What a damned fool I am! Serves me right for being a filthy voyeur. Climbed a tree to watch iguanodons mating at the foot of Bakker Falls. At climatic moment the branch broke. I dropped twenty meters. Grabbed a lower limb or I’d be dead now. As it is, pretty badly smashed around. I don’t think anything’s broken, but my left leg won’t support me and my back’s in bad shape. Internal injuries too? Not sure. I’ve crawled into a little rock-shelter near the falls. Exhausted and maybe feverish. Shock, most likely. I suppose I’ll starve now. It would have been an honor to be eaten by a tyrannosaur, but to die from falling out of a tree is just plain humiliating.

  The mating of iguanodons is a spectacular sight, by the way. But I hurt too much to describe it now.

  31 August. 1700 hours. Stiff, sore, hungry, hideously thirsty. Leg still useless and when I try to crawl even a few meters, I feel as if I’m going to crack in half at the waist. High fever.

  How long does it take to starve to death?

  1 Sep. 0700 hours. Three broken eggs lying near me when I awoke. Embryos still alive—probably stegosaur—but not for long. First food in forty-eight hours. Did the eggs fall out of a nest somewhere overhead? Do stegosaurs make their nests in trees, dummy?

  Fever diminishing. Body aches all over. Crawled to the stream and managed to scoop up a little water.

  1330 hours. Dozed off. Awakened to find haunch of fresh meat within crawling distance. Struthiomimus drumstick, I think. Nasty sour taste, but it’s edible. Nibbled a little, slept again, ate some more. Pair of stegosaurs grazing not far away, tiny eyes fastened on me. Smaller dinosaurs holding a kind of conference by some big cycads. And Bertha Brachiosaur is munching away in Ostrom Meadow, benignly supervising the whole scene.

  This is absolutely crazy.

  I think the dinosaurs are taking care of me.

  2 Sep. 0900 hours. No doubt of it at all. They bring eggs, meat, even cycad cones and tree-fern fronds. At first they delivered things only when I slept, but now they come hopping right up to me and dump things at my feet. The struthiomimids are the bearers—they’re the smallest, most agile, quickest hands. They bring their offerings, stare me right in the eye, pause as if waiting for a tip. Other dinosaurs watching from the distance. This is a coordinated effort. I am the center of all activity on the island, it seems. I imagine that even the tyrannosaurs are saving choice cuts for me. Hallucination? Fantasy? Delirium of fever? I feel lucid. The fever is abating. I’m still too stiff and weak to move very far, but I think I’m recovering from the effects of my fall. With a little help from my friends.

  1000 hours. Played back the last entry. Thinking it over. I don’t think I’ve gone insane. If I’m insane enough to be worried about my sanity, how crazy can I be? Or am I just fooling myself? There’s a terrible conflict between what I think I perceive going on here and what I know I ought to be perceiving.

  1500 hours. A long, strange dream this afternoon. I saw all the dinosaurs standing in the meadow and they were connected to one another by gleaming threads, like the telephone lines of olden times, and all the threads centered on Bertha. As if she’s the switchboard, yes. And telepathic messages were traveling. An extrasensory hookup, powerful pulses moving along the lines. I dreamed that a small dinosaur came to me and offered me a line and, in pantomime, showed me how to hook it up, and a great flood of delight went through me as I made the connection. And when I plugged it in, I could feel the deep and heavy thoughts of the dinosaurs, the slow rapturous philosophical interchanges.

  When I woke, the dream seemed bizarrely vivid, strangely real, the dream-ideas lingering as they sometimes do. I saw the animals about me in a new way. As if this is not just a zoological research station, but a community, a settlement, the sole outpost of an alien civilization—an alien civilization native to earth.

  Come off it. These animals have minute brains. They spend their days chomping on greenery, except for the ones that chomp on other dinosaurs. Compared with dinosaurs, cows and sheep are downright geniuses.

  I can hobble a little now.

  8 Sep. 0600 hours. The same dream again last night, the universal telepathic linkage. Sense of warmth and love flowing from dinosaurs to me.

  Fresh tyrannosaur eggs for breakfast.

  6 Sep. 1100 hours. I’m making a fast recovery. Up and about, still creaky but not much pain left. They still feed me. Though the struthiomimids remain the bearers of food, the bigger dinosaurs now come close, too. A stegosaur nuzzled up to me like some Goliath-sized pony, and I petted its rough scaly flank. The diplodocus stretched out flat and seemed to beg me to stroke its immense neck.

  If this is madness, so be it. There’s community here, loving and temperate. Even the predatory carnivores are part of it: eaters and eaten are aspects of the whole, yin and yang. Riding around in our sealed modules, we could never have suspected any of this.

  They are gradually drawing me into their communion. I feel the pulses that pass between them. My entire soul throbs with that strange new sensation. My skin tingles.

  They bring me food of their own bodies, their flesh and their unborn young, and they watch over me and silently urge me back to health. Why? For sweet char
ity’s sake? I don’t think so. I think they want something from me. I think they need something from me.

  What could they need from me?

  6 Sep. 0600 hours. All this night I have moved slowly through the forest in what I can only term an ecstatic state. Vast shapes, humped monstrous forms barely visible by dim glimmer, came and went about me. Hour after hour I walked unharmed, feeling the communion intensify. Until at last, exhausted, I have come to rest here on this mossy carpet, and in the first light of dawn I see the giant form of the great brachiosaur standing like a mountain on the far side of Owen River.

  I am drawn to her. I could worship her. Through her vast body surge powerful currents. She is the amplifier. By her are we all connected. The holy mother of us all. From the enormous mass of her body emanate potent healing impulses.

  I’ll rest a little while. Then I’ll cross the river to her.

  0900 hours. We stand face to face. Her head is fifteen meters above mine. Her small eyes are unreadable. I trust her and I love her.

  Lesser brachiosaurs have gathered behind her on the riverbank. Farther away are dinosaurs of half a dozen other species, immobile, silent.

  I am humble in their presence. They are representatives of a dynamic, superior race, which but for a cruel cosmic accident would rule the earth to this day, and I am coming to revere them.

  Consider: they endured for a hundred forty million years in ever-renewing vigor. They met all evolutionary challenges, except the one of sudden and catastrophic climate change against which nothing could have protected them. They multiplied and proliferated and adapted, dominating land and sea and air, covering the globe. Our own trifling, contemptible ancestors were nothing next to them. Who knows what these dinosaurs might have achieved if that crashing asteroid had not blotted out their light? What a vast irony: millions of years of supremacy ended in a single generation by a chilling cloud of dust. But until then—the wonder, the grandeur—

  Only beasts, you say? How can you be sure? We know just a shred of what the Mesozoic was really like, just a slice, literally the bare bones. The passage of a hundred million years can obliterate all traces of civilization. Suppose they had language, poetry, mythology, philosophy? Love, dreams, aspirations? No, you say, they were beasts, ponderous and stupid, that lived mindless bestial lives. And I reply that we puny hairy ones have no right to impose our own values on them. The only kind of civilization we can understand is the one we have built. We imagine that our own trivial accomplishments are the determining case, that computers and spaceships and broiled sausages are such miracles that they place us at evolution’s pinnacle. But now I know otherwise. Humanity has done marvelous things, yes. But we would not have existed at all had this greatest of races been allowed to live to fulfill its destiny.

  I feel the intense love radiating from the titan that looms above me. I feel the contact between our souls steadily strengthening and deepening.

  The last barriers dissolve.

  And I understand at last.

  I am the chosen one. I am the vehicle. I am the bringer of rebirth, the beloved one, the necessary one. Our Lady of the Sauropods am I, the holy one, the prophetess, the priestess.

  Is this madness? Then it is madness.

  Why have we small hairy creatures existed at all? I know now. It is so that through our technology we could make possible the return of the great ones. They perished unfairly. Through us, they are resurrected aboard this tiny glove in space.

  I tremble in the force of the need that pours from them.

  I will not fail you, I tell the great sauropods before me, and the sauropods send my thoughts reverberating to all the others.

  20 September. 0600 hours. The thirtieth day. The shuttle comes from Habitat Vronsky today to pick me up and deliver the next researcher.

  I wait at the transit lock. Hundreds of dinosaurs wait with me, each close beside the nest, both the lions and the lambs, gathered quietly, their attention focused entirely on me.

  Now the shuttle arrives, right on time, gliding in for a perfect docking. The airlocks open. A figure appears. Sarber himself! Coming to make sure I didn’t survive the meltdown, or else to finish me off.

  He stands blinking in the entry passage, gaping at the throngs of placid dinosaurs arrayed in a huge semicircle around the naked woman who stands beside the wreckage of the mobile module. For a moment he is unable to speak.

  “Anne?” he says finally. “What in God’s name—”

  “You’ll never understand,” I tell him. I give the signal. Belshazzar rumbles forward. Sarber screams and whirls and sprints for the airlock, but a stegosaur blocks the way.

  “No!” Sarber cries, as the tyrannosaur’s mighty head swoops down. It is all over in a moment.

  Revenge! How sweet!

  And this is only the beginning. Habitat Vronsky lies just 120 kilometers away. Elsewhere in the Lagrange belt are hundreds of other habitats ripe for conquest. The earth itself is within easy reach. I have no idea yet how it will be accomplished, but I know it will be done and done successfully, and I will be the instrument by which it is done.

  I stretch forth my arms to the mighty creatures that surround me. I feel their strength, their power, their harmony. I am one with them, and they with me.

  The Great Race has returned, and I am its priestess. Let the hairy ones tremble!

  Waiting for the Earthquake

  I did make one attempt at writing fiction during that fallow period that ran from early in 1975 to late in 1978, and it was a horrifying failure.

  Harlan Ellison, one of my oldest friends, was editing an anthology called Medea, for which a lot of well-known science-fiction writers were supposed to invent the specifications of an imaginary world and then write stories set in the fictional background they had devised. Although I had already retired “forever” from writing in the spring of 1975, and had said so publicly, I agreed to help Harlan in planning Medea. But I warned him that I wasn’t going to write a story for the book. And so I took part in a spectacular event in Los Angeles in which, before an audience of a thousand or more astonished science-fiction enthusiasts, Frank Herbert, Thomas M. Disch, Theodore Sturgeon, and I, using suggestions laid down by Frederik Pohl and Poul Anderson, created a story framework for the Medea anthology.

  Then it was time to write the actual stories. Herbert wrote one; so did Sturgeon; Pohl did; Anderson did; Disch did. So did various other people. But I had said I wasn’t going to write a story, and I didn’t write one. I can be a very stubborn man.

  Harlan Ellison can be stubborn, too. Over the next two years he telephoned me constantly with progress reports on Medea and urged me to do a story after all. I told him repeatedly that I was sticking to my decision never to write again. He persisted, though, and finally overcame my resistance to the extent that one day in 1977 I actually put a piece of paper in the typewriter—typewriters were what people used for writing fiction back in that era—and started a Medea story.

  I got one sentence written, at the very most. Then a powerful wave of nausea came over me—literally—and I pulled the page from the machine and threw it away, and phoned Harlan and told him that I was not only unwilling but, apparently physically and mentally unable to write anything just then, and when he realized I was serious he relented and let me off the hook. That was the one and only attempt I made at writing stories during my long “retirement.”

  But a year or so later whatever sinister spell had prevented me from writing wore off, and I wrote the first of the Majipoor novels without extraordinary difficulty, and then after a time I wrote “Our Lady of the Sauropods” for Omni. Harlan, upon finding out that I seemed to be capable of writing again, informed me that Medea was still waiting for me. He is a very stubborn man, yes, but he is also one of the least punctual beings on this planet, and the anthology that I thought had been completed two years before had not yet gone to the publisher. Harlan hadn’t even written his own story for the book—indeed was having great trouble with it.


  Since the anthology was now complete except for my story and Harlan’s, and Harlan had already sketched out the one he was planning to write, the difficult job of writing the final piece, the one that summed everything up, fell to me. But I did have the advantage, denied to all of the other contributors, of being able to read the whole manuscript (except for the unwritten Ellison story) before I started. And so “Waiting for the Earthquake,” which I wrote with relatively little difficulty in February, 1980, became an unusual technical stunt in which I made at least one reference to a scene or event from each of the other stories, regardless of the inconsistencies that had developed among those stories. I don’t know if anyone ever noticed how careful I had been to touch every base.

  The contributors to Medea were permitted to publish their stories elsewhere before the appearance of the anthology. I sold mine to Robert Sheckley of Omni. It was used, not in the magazine itself, but in a companion publication called The Best of Omni Science Fiction, in 1981.

  Harlan, meanwhile, was continuing to have problems with his Medea story. He had a title for it and most of a plot, but he was as thoroughly unable to write it as I had been with mine, years before. In the end he came up from Los Angeles to my home near San Francisco and I held him prisoner here for several days, not letting him out of his room except for meals, while he wrote and revised his story, “With Virgil Oddums at the East Pole.” After a gestation period of something like nine years, Medea was at last finished. The book, which is one of the greatest of all science-fiction anthologies, finally appeared in 1985.